three main questions for beginner

[Eain]

Hallò evryone, i'm just fresh in gaelic, so I have many questions.

Three questions:
1. how much dialects in scottish gaelic? Which one's pronounciation is taught in school books and any language courses?
2.how to say off-topic?
3. is thare any kind of nasalizations in gaelic, like urú in irish?

Le meas,
Eain

[Níall Beag]

1. how much dialects in scottish gaelic? Which one's pronounciation is taught in school books and any language courses?

How many colours are in a rainbow? It's hard to define "a dialect" as they all blur into each other.

3. is thare any kind of nasalizations in gaelic, like urú in irish?

There's no grammatical nasalisation, but vowels are often nasalised before mh. The less the MH is pronounced, the more of the M's nasal character is picked up by the vowel.

[Eain]

1. how much dialects in scottish gaelic? Which one's pronounciation is taught in school books and any language courses?

How many colours are in a rainbow? It's hard to define "a dialect" as they all blur into each other.

3. is thare any kind of nasalizations in gaelic, like urú in irish?

There's no grammatical nasalisation, but vowels are often nasalised before mh. The less the MH is pronounced, the more of the M's nasal character is picked up by the vowel.

1. I mean, looking at irish, it's three dialects - northern, western, and southern. All are separated. Is in Gaìdhlig the same situation, or dialects just flow into each other?

2. Can you show some examples with this 'before mh'?

[akerbeltz]

There are perhaps 5 large dialect groupings that are relevant today. Lewis, Southern Hebrides, Skye, Wester Ross, Argyll.

There is a type of eclipsis (úrú) in Gaelic. It's slightly different from Irish in the sense it's synchronic, not diachronic. That means that after certain nasals (especially the definite article if it ends in -n) the following consoant is affects. But only if the -n is actually still a phoneme. In Irish this works even if the n is only nominally in existance eg ocht gcait vs Gaelic ochd cait. This is not written in Gaelic as it's a natural result of morphophonemics. The outcome varies from dialect to dialect. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[faoileag]

Mòran taing, Akerbeltz, I am definitely not going to worry about it!

Eain:
Examples of 'nasal' 'o' before 'mh':

còmhla ri - together with
Didòmhnaich - Sunday
Dòmhnall

(Is that what you meant, a Nèill?)

Sorry, can't do more sophisticated phonetic transcription.

[Níall Beag]

Yup, a Fhaoilig, that's what I was getting at.

[akerbeltz]

That type of nasalisation is also especially common near disappearing or historic nasals such as cunntas, cumhachd, teanga etc

[Eain]

Hallo, again. I wonder, on what speaking norm, grammar rules dialect is based standard scottish aelic?